This all started when I discovered the ARSA Top-40 surveys site. I grew up in the sixties listening to top forty radio, mostly the Chicago market with WLS, WCFL, and WJJD. The ARSA site had all the weekly radio surveys and helped me rediscover the oldies that I loved back then, and my music collection grew. I started building playlists in iTunes for various survey weeks, and over time I had playlists with at least the top ten songs for every WLS survey of the sixties. I then discovered WLS and Dick Biondi and other sixties radio airchecks on youtube, and started mining for jingles, old commercials, and DJ soundbytes. I mixed the jingles and commercials, and some computer speech for dates and such, into my survey countdown playlists, which gave me "virtual sixties radio" listening. Before long, I had added playlists for many radio stations across the US and Canada.

This was all great fun for me, listening on my computer and iPod, and I thought it might be fun to share this "virtual sixties radio" on the web. So that gave birth the the Vinyl Vortex Oldies show.

It's about the sixties music (best era ever) primarily, but also the history - jingles, commercials, and other audio artifacts. Since I wanted to organize the songs into various "sets", and give the title, artist, and year or every song, we needed an announcer, and it's my voice doing the announcing, along with some computer-generated speech. We minimize the non-musical content, and shows are around 90% real oldies music, and 10% announcer bumpers, jingles, commercials, and other vintage soundbytes. At any rate, you can stream a show and know what you're hearing without having to look at a screen.

I came up with the week-of-the-year concept to partition shows by the music that was on the charts a particular week of a month, but across all ten years of the sixties. For simplicity, I settled on 4 weeks per month, so in the end there will be 48 shows. I would like to get all 3,000 songs from my collection into a show, and at around 100 songs per show, that should work out with not too many songs duplicated across shows. (You don't want to know about the horrible process of encoding iTunes tags for 3,000 songs so that smart playlists can display the songs for a particular week).

As far as each show's song organization, we use common radio groupings like artist twin spins, triple-plays, survey countdowns, artist profile, one-hit-wonders, "forgotten" oldies, etc., along with recurring features like Movie Songs, Celebrity Spotlight (singers who are also TV / movie actors), Look-What-They've-Done-To-My-Song (two or more versions of the same song), "Answer" songs, Beatle Mania, King's Korner (Elvis), Danze Kraze, Name Game, Girl Power, Psychedelic Cellar, and Way-Back Machine visits to the Fifties, as well as Mystery Themes and Cross-Country Road Trips. Each show features two flashback countdowns from two years of the sixties, which begin with a bit of a recap of what the world was like in that week in the news and culture.

As far as playback, each show is around 4 to 5 hours total length, and is split into 3 or 4 parts. Gaps have been edited out, and the volume normalized across tracks, so you get a pretty smooth, continous flow of music, bumpers, and vintage artifacts. This is NOT a song-streaming service, and the only way to skip around is to use whatever your playback device and software supply.

We would love to get requests and suggestions as new shows are always being developed.

Six String Mark is a lover of good music of all styles, with a particular love for the pop music of the sixties. He is a baby-boomer, a guitar player, a website developer, a grandpa, father of three daughters, and married for over thirty years to a wonderful woman, also a musician, who puts up with his virtual radio project.

Thanks to the Lord for all His good gifts.